The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem

Oliver Tearle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350027039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire en poésie

The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem explores how cultural responses to the trauma of the First World War found expression in the form of the modernist long poem. Beginning with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Oliver Tearle reads that most famous example of the genre in comparison with lesser known long poems, such as Hope Mirrlees's Paris: A Poem, Richard Aldington's A Fool I' the Forest and Nancy Cunard's Parallax. As well as presenting a new history of this neglected genre, the book examines the ways in which the modernist long poem represented the seminal literary form for grappling with the crises of European modernity in the wake of World War I.

1

Towards the Long Poem

The wreck of 1918

In December 1918, one month after the Armistice marking the end of the First World War, the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, oversaw the publication of a slim volume of poems by a virtually unknown poet who had been dead for nearly 30 years. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins heralded the publication for the first time of many of the poems of the Jesuit priest who had died in 1889. One of the curious things about Hopkins’s poems is how quickly they appeared to become relevant, owing to world events that had occurred during the year of their publication. Hopkins’s long poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, inspired by the sinking of a ship called the Deutschland in 1875, never saw the light of day at the time – it was rejected for publication in 1876 – but instead it entered the world in 1918, when the country of ‘Deutschland’ or Germany was a political and financial wreck following the defeat of Kaiser Wilhelm II at the end of the First World War. Although neither modernist nor about the war, Hopkins’s poem was greeted by a readership that was responding to both relatively recent ‘events’: the advent of literary modernism and the end of the Great War.

What is more, the language of Hopkins’s poem was far more unusual and innovative than that found in most Victorian (and even Georgian) verse:

Five! the finding and sake

And cipher of suffering Christ.

Mark, the mark is of man’s make

And the word of it Sacrificed.

But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken,

Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced –

Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token

For lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.¹

For all of their differences in language and style, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and The Waste Land have much in common, beside the idea of a wrecked ‘land’ that is glimpsed – through wordplay only – in Hopkins’s poem as well as in Eliot’s. Both are at least partly about a shipwreck; both feature drowned bodies; both are elegies or laments for something that has been lost (the lives of the nuns in Hopkins’s poem; spirituality and a sense of purpose in Eliot’s). Both are partly about religious faith – and the loss of that faith – in an increasingly secular age. But what most strikingly brings the two poems together in their post-war publication context is the way they both represent a radical break with the norms and conventions of the poetry of their time. In his influential 1932 study, New Bearings in English Poetry, F. R. Leavis chose to discuss Hopkins alongside the two major figures of modernist poetry in Britain, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

But although many of Hopkins’s poems only found themselves into print for the first time in 1918, a number of them had already appeared in several anthologies, and one of these, The Spirit of Man (1916), attracted a substantial readership thanks to its popularity among soldiers in the trenches. This anthology included the opening stanza of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, meaning that when the first full edition of Hopkins’s poems appeared barely a month after the Armistice in 1918, a keen readership had already been created from soldiers returning from the war. Martin Dubois has recently noted that one notable early reader was F. R. Leavis, who ‘was one of a number of the poet’s early critical champions to conceive of Hopkins as an advance party in the modernist effort to renew and revitalize forms of poetic expression’.² Leavis was working as an orderly serving ambulance trains and later described his championing of Hopkins in pointedly warlike terms: ‘Hopkins in fact gave one a good military opportunity’ for ‘an effective attack in that sector could tell in the campaign to get recognition for a greater poet – [T. S.] Eliot’.³

But aside from its opening stanza, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ would remain largely unpublished until 1918 when the war was over. It had been written in 1876 but was rejected for publication, and remained in manuscript form for over 40 years. Whether Eliot encountered Hopkins’s poetry when it was published in 1918, we do not know for certain; he may have read Hopkins only later and had certainly done so when he came to write of Hopkins as a ‘fine poet’ if of ‘narrow range’ in his 1934 book After Strange Gods.⁴ But we are not talking about influence here so much as the cultural atmosphere which gave rise to Eliot’s poem, and part of that cultural atmosphere must include the publication of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ as well as the writing and publication of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris and Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, both written and published prior to Eliot’s. Hopkins’s poem is different from the other three in having been written long before the war rather than immediately after it. But it is like theirs in that readers – aside from Bridges and a few others who had read ‘The Wreck’ in manuscript – would only first encounter Hopkins’s long poem in full in the immediate post-war era.

Robert Bridges declared of Hopkins’s poem that it ‘stands logically as well as chronologically in the front of his book, like a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance’: a challenge not just to the reader’s comprehension but to their tastes and expectations for poetry and the poetic.⁵ Early critical responses to Hopkins’s work – such as influential readings by I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis – effectively heralded Hopkins as a modern poet, more at home with the modernists than with Tennyson or Browning. In their Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), Laura Riding and Robert Graves call Hopkins one of the ‘first modernist poets to feel the need of a clearness and accuracy in feelings and their expression so minute, so more than scientific, as to make of poetry a higher sort of psychology’.⁶ Humphry House went so far as to claim that ‘hardly a poet writing between the wars was not directly influenced by Gerard Hopkins’.⁷ The bafflement experienced by some early readers of Hopkins was similar to the confusion which Eliot’s poetry provoked in his early readers. Gillian Beer has noted, ‘When Robert Bridges first published Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1918 the modernist movement claimed him as a displaced contemporary stranded among the Victorians with whom he was assumed to have had little in common.’⁸ Although more recent criticism has shown just how thoroughly ‘Victorian’ Hopkins was in many respects, the fact that Bridges felt his friend’s work could only appear before a patient public once the First World War was over is important in directing us to the various crossovers between the modernist enterprise and Hopkins’s own distinctive approach to prosody, poetic language and imagery.

‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ is an elegy: a word which, according to Stephen Spender, Eliot once used to describe The Waste Land; and The Waste Land is, on one level, certainly a poem in memory of the dead.⁹ As J. Hillis Miller noted, Hopkins’s poem is ‘an elegy for the dead, part of the long tradition of elegies in English stretching from “Lycidas” to The Waste Land and “The Owl in the Sarcophagus”’.¹⁰ The difference between the two poems is that in Eliot’s poem there is an almost surreal sense that the dead will not stay dead: the first section is titled ‘The Burial of the Dead’ but ends with the poem’s speaker asking Stetson whether the corpse he planted in his garden has begun to sprout (ll. 71–2). In ‘Death by Water’, where the sea replaces the earth as the site of uncertain burial, Phlebas the Phoenician has been ‘a fortnight dead’ (l. 312) but appears to be reliving his life as he bobs up and down on the water: ‘As he rose and fell / He passed the stages of his age and youth’ (ll. 316–17), with ‘rose’ offering the grim possibility of resurrection, a hope that is immediately negated with the words ‘and fell’. He is, like Hopkins’s drowned nuns, merely floating on the sea’s tide, but he cannot be roused from death. And, of course, Eliot’s poem opens with an epigraph about a woman, the Cumaean Sibyl, who should have died long ago but has been kept alive to wither and fade over many years. The drowned Phoenician sailor, and other aspects of The Waste Land, have been interpreted as representations of Jean Verdenal, the young French poet to whose memory Eliot dedicated his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. Although Hopkins died before the outbreak of the war, his long poem first came to public attention just as the British reading public was recovering from a four-year war. The prefatory poem to the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Robert Bridges, dated June 1918, noted that ‘Hell wars without’, and as John Schad has suggested, ‘the Deutschland’ or Germany was, by 1918, ‘virtually wrecked by four years of war’ and so ‘becomes the hidden subject’ of Hopkins’s poem.¹¹ If The Waste Land is a poem concerned with prophecy, whether in the form of Tiresias having ‘foresuffered all’ (l. 243) or Madame Sosostris dealing out her Tarot cards, there is a sense that, in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, Hopkins’s portrait of suffering is also an example of foresuffering.

There is another peculiar coincidence between ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and The Waste Land: the fact that, when they were first published in book form, they carried editorial notes, as if they had already become works of scholarship as well as canonical works of literature, even upon initial book publication. In his June 1922 ‘London Letter’ for The Dial, Eliot praised Hopkins’s editor, Robert Bridges, as ‘the best living specimen in England of the good academic poet; and the word “academic” is not to be read in a pejorative sense’.¹² It is commonly thought that Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land were added as a belated afterthought ‘to provide a few more pages of printed matter’, in Eliot’s own words, ‘with the result that they became the remarkable expos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Also published by Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Towards the Long Poem
• 2 Writing the Mother-City: Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem
• 3 Battered Books: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
• 4 A Poem without a Hero: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
• 5 Machine: T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’
• 6 Arden to Ardennes: Richard Aldington, A Fool i’ the Forest
• 7 Nancy Cunard’s Parallax and the ‘Emotions of Aftermath’
• Afterword: Towards the Epic
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page